we thought to build us houses
by Raindog Bride
Summary: He was never going to outlive her. Ellie, Joel, and an exploration of inevitability.


_"__You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief."_

_-Cathrynne Valente, Deathless_

* * *

In the end, it's plain old pneumonia that gets him.

Watching it happen is one of those long, terrible, baffling things that Ellie will never be able to wrap her brain around. Violent death is one thing. Watching someone go as their lungs fill up with warm crap is something else.

Joel's old. Their antibiotics are expired, and there aren't enough of them. Autumn's never-ending bout with the flu turns into winter's long hard drag downward for a body whose reserves are too burned out to fight back anymore, and he is so skinny by then. The bones in his wrists stand out like girders. The muscle melted away like wax.

Tommy expects her to cry; he'd like it if she cried. Instead Ellie thinks about a girl in a dirty coat with raw eyes and a bite on her palm; she thinks about how much easier it would be if Joel would just lose his mind when he died, so he couldn't see her sitting there, not crying, like she didn't care.

She would have been ready for it if he'd called out for her before he went. For Sarah, even. She braces herself for it, like bracing for a gunshot, for a rib breaking.

He doesn't say a word, though; he just goes to sleep, and then his lungs give up the ghost. He stops breathing an hour or two after that.

* * *

The bandits hit late in the autumn, almost desperately, like that first bout of snow made them realize that they didn't have nearly enough supplies to make it through a winter in the mountains.

Joel takes his hunting rifle- they don't have the ammo for any of the automatic weapons anymore, but making .32 calibre bullets is simple enough with the right equipment, and on a good week, they have it. He likes making bullets; Ellie's watched him do it. He's good with his hands. The work is simple, and easy on his joints. It calms him down.

But the people at the dam don't have AK's. The bandits do.

Ellie isn't even where the fighting's thickest at the dam, she's downriver, by the fish farm they'd set up that summer, and has a hell of a time making her way back to town.

When she gets there, they tell her he was shot six times- three times in the stomach, twice in the upper chest, and once in the right side of his jaw. Tommy doesn't want her to see the body. Ellie almost rips a hole in her throat screaming at him.

* * *

The dam is overrun in its first year, but overrun is a strong word, and misleading at best. Overrun implies a great show of force. In reality, it's a slow, dragging _wounding._

The bandits never let up. They're under-equipped, but there's always more of them. Killing them doesn't feel like it did when she was younger; she doesn't feel relieved, she doesn't feel like she outran something bigger than meaner than she was. She feels smaller. And she feels mean.

Killing Infected doesn't make her feel anything. Not unless they're small, not unless they're freshly bit, and children are as rare as anything else these days- as fresh fruit, as medicine, as engineers. But the Infected aren't rare, and neither are bandits, and neither are sudden floods or frosts or sagging fence-lines or tainted food. The community built around the dam splinters apart, and it doesn't flood the countryside with fleeing survivors as much as it lets loose a trickle of freshly Infected and stony-faced loners.

Joel and Ellie make it out with each other, just like always. There's still a spray of blood on his cheek from when he delivered Tommy's mercy shot. They have their packs. They have their guns. It's like old times.

They last six months together.

He goes out on a supply run, while she stays in camp with a case of the shits so bad she can barely make it from her bedroll to the bucket outside.

"Be back in a few," he says, pulling his pack over one shoulder. He's settled some in his skin the last few months. Joel can survive anything; he can live with anything. There isn't anything more anyone can do to him. Ellie wants to be like that so bad it's like a rock in her gut, claiming her, even after everything that's happened. She used to think not grieving meant you never cared in the first place- now she knows better.

"Yeah, yeah," she says, drawing her sleeping bag up under her chin.

He stoops, his back creaking. It surprises her. She has to smell terrible, like stale sweat and sickness and b.o. that could drop a horse, but he smoothes her hair (too short, she cut it way too fucking short) and plants a brusque, scratchy kiss right on the crown of her head. "Hang in there babygirl," he says, like he hasn't in months, like she'd thought he'd forgotten how to, then turns for the door.

He doesn't make it back, not ever, and Ellie never learns how not to grieve.

* * *

A clicker bite, high on his thigh. Joel blows his brains out.

* * *

While working on the dam, his foot slips, or maybe the walkway sags, but either way he ends up wedged at the bottom of the reservoir right up against the belly of the dam, the water crushing him down. They bring him up with hooks.

* * *

She doesn't know how to say goodbye; she never has and she never will.

She wants to ask him too many questions instead, she wants to drag too many things out of him that'll kill him as surely as what's killing him now. At this point it's hard to say what's killing him, whether it's the lack of drugs to burn out the infection in his leg, the exhaustion, the loss of blood, or the fact that Joel's been waiting for something to put a bullet in his head for the last thirty years or more. He isn't fighting it, and she wants to know why so bad it's tearing something loose and bloody inside her, fighting to escape.

He'll only say one thing and that's that he's sorry.

He won't say what for, but he means it, it's clear how hard he means it. He's white around the eyes and white around the mouth, and he keeps saying he's sorry, he's sorry Ellie, but she doesn't want his sorrys, she wants answers. This wasn't how he lived; this wasn't how he taught her to live. You never felt sorry about anything. You never looked back. Might as well put a gun in your mouth and swallow it whole.

It might not have been a way to live, but apparently it was how Joel chose to die. Telling her how sorry he was, for something he couldn't even name, holding her hand in the dark so hard she bruised.

* * *

She leaves Tommy's when she's seventeen, not even able to look Joel in the eye anymore. It turned out that she couldn't live with the truth, the one she'd known ever since she'd woken up in the backseat of that car in Utah still smelling like alcohol wipes and rubber tubing. It turns out she can't live with her mother's letter burning a hole in her chest when she knows, deep down, what must have happened to Marlene.

She leaves after one more screaming, blow-out fight. His knee's shot after the landslide last spring; she knows he can't follow her if she leaves, and she wants to get everything out in the open where she can get a bead on its head, where she can shoot to kill.

He clams up in the end, just like always. And it's that more than anything that kills the bond between them, kills the girl who once heaved herself out from under a dying horse for him, for his sake, to keep the wolves from catching his trail.

"I fucking _know_, okay?" she finally screams, finally throws it at him like a bullet. "I always knew. You_ fucking asshole_."

He's not there, though, she realizes just from watching him board himself up at her words. There wasn't a person in there, there hadn't been for a long time. Just impulses. Just an old man going through the motions of trauma over and over again, just trying to keep one more of his little girls from dying in his arms.

Ellie was sick of being a symbol. She was sick of a lot of things. And when you were sick, you opened it up with a knife and let the pus drain out. You sewed yourself up; you cut the thread off with your teeth.

She leaves, and he doesn't (_can't_) follow.

Two years later- taller, skinnier, steadier than she used to be- she makes her way up the mountain again.

The river runs high and wild with last night's rain, pouring out from the gaping teeth of the broken dam. The Infected wander drunkenly down the road from all the shattered and haunted houses that used to belong to thirty families, six horses, and four dogs. Dogs that had all had names, that had all come when you called, no matter where you were.

* * *

Sometimes Ellie doesn't know if she's a person any more than she's a collection of everything that has ever happened to her. She doesn't know if she's worth more than what she's lost. She doesn't know if she's more than the bite on her arm, or the gun in her hands, or the look in the eye of the man who won't ever tell her what was traded to keep her alive. What she does know is that there's no end of things you can survive. And that surviving, like anything else, is contextual.

He talked to her about it once. Only once. Not about Marlene, but Ellie doesn't think anything's going to be able to pry up those floorboards and haul that body out into the open air. He doesn't do it for years anyway, long after the nightmares about David have settled down, long after she buried a battered old robot there at the bottom of the falls where the dirt was soft.

He'd been drunk. Being drunk made him smaller, made the stiffness in his back more apparent, made the swelling in his joints stand out even more. The grey in his hair had finally crept down his temples and beard like a slowly descending frost. She didn't remember why she'd been there- she stayed away from him when he was drunk, just like he stayed away from the kids that had cropped up in town over the years. Some things you avoided because you knew they were going to burn you.

"You do things," he'd said, so sudden and clear it was like he hadn't drunk anything. "Things. You can't, not do them. Can't, cut your hands off. Can't let it happen." He looked at her, and he said, just like before, "You find _reasons_."

She couldn't pretend not to know what he was talking about, for all it had come out of the blue. Just like she couldn't pretend she'd never really liked the idea of being someone's reason for anything they did.

She understood more than he realized, that you didn't explain why you survived, that sometimes there were no explanations. She knew down to her bones that he never would have survived losing her. She knows now that she's older, now that she's grown to carry the weight of the things that have happened to her, that she would have. And would still.

Their world grows so much smaller towards the end, like it's just the two of them again. The lines on her brow disappear, the stretchmarks on her belly too, and then it's as if she's fourteen and hurting again, and he's going on fifty and hurting again, and the world is just big enough to contain both of them once more. Joel and Ellie and all that hurt and the routine of living from day to day with that same slow and grinding ache of impending loss.

She wonders how different the world would be now if he hadn't loved her as much as he did.

She wonders how different she would be. But in the end, fourteen and hurting isn't all that much different from thirty-eight and hurting, and she lets it go.

They can both feel it coming; they can't help it. He slows down more and more. He doesn't complain, but he stops eating, and they both know what happens to an animal once its off it's feed. She gets the feeling that if she weren't here he'd be like one of those dogs on the farms back before the world ended, the ones that scratched a hole under the porch just to die somewhere quiet and out of the way.

Ellie knows her fourteen-year-old self now like the back of her hand, knows her with the skill and benefit of distance and forgiveness and regret. She doesn't think that that Ellie would be up to the task of a deathwatch, that she would be able to accept a loss like this one, one that you couldn't even do anything about. Just watch, just hold on to it while you could. Just make sure it knew it was loved.

He talks more, even without the benefit of being drunk. He tells her about Sarah. He tells her about his ex-wife, even. He tells her about the things he did before coming to the Boston QZ, about the things he probably hadn't had to do but did anyway. There was a time this would have electrified her, would have glued her to the spot, would have tied her even closer to him, but she's not that girl now and even the bite on her arm is nothing more than a whiteish, wind-roughed lump. These things just make her sad. The man telling them to her makes her sad. But the girl she is now knows how to deal with sadness.

When she thinks about what this is, what they're both doing together here and now, the words from a long-rotted comic book come back to her, but all it does is make her smile. This isn't the kind of thing you endure.

She's glad to be here.

Late that morning, he wakes up. He doesn't sit up, but he's alert. He asks for water, then changes his mind, and asks for coffee. She tells him she'll have to go over to Tommy's for coffee, and he says that's fine, that's mighty fine.

She pulls on her coat. Her shoulder creaks, the trick one. She stops by his bed to kiss him on the head, old habits and all that, and he reaches up, and up, with one of those big, rough old hands she'd know the shape and smell and weight of anywhere. He misses her face, but she catches his hand and holds it in hers, for a second or so.

If he had something to say, now would be the time to say it. But Joel has saved and squandered his chances for doing the right thing on only a few rare instances in his long and bewildering life, and all he does is squeeze her hand as much as he can and says, gruffly, "Be waitin' for that coffee."

He stopped even drinking water last night, no matter how much she asked him to try.

"Be back before you know it," she replies, and lets his hand go. He tucks it under the coverlet, on his chest, where she'll find it later, wrapped arthritically around an old photo of a different man, long ago, standing with his arm around his daughter.

Before she lets the door swing shut, she lets the words slip out, loose and easy and crooked from how long she's been holding on to them, worn shiny as an old dog tag from how much she's handled them. "Love you."

He breathes out, his eyes already closed. "You too, babygirl."

Ellie lets the door hitch shut. The morning's sun coming in strong, and the sounds of the town waking up are coming from all around her. Her stomach growls, and the idea of coffee sounds good, sounds more than good, and that's what she thinks about during the long walk to Tommy's.


End file.
